[renaudg]

The problem may have more to do with Uganda and having a surveillance state than it has to do with National ID cards.

Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.

Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded : for the purpose of identity verification they just use alternative documents & processes that are less straightforward and at least as intrusive (e.g. driving licenses, utility bills and credit checks in the US and UK).

IMO it's much more honest to recognize that there's a legitimate need to be able to prove one's identity in a functioning society, and to build a dedicated system for that, instead of tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around.

[abdullahkhalids]

I don't see any example in the article, in which some bad action by the Ugandan government could only have been done due to the existence of the national ID card.

The core problem is digitization. Once you have people's activity in digital form, it only takes a couple of dozen bits to super uniquely identify every person in the country. ID cards just formalize that.

[viraptor]

On the other hand, have you ever tried to do something even slightly unusual with paper documentation? It's not just convenient to have it digitised, it's close to necessary unless you want to spend months of your life chasing (for example) the right way to translate and certify the validity of an entry of your change of name in an old printed volume of The Gazette in the UK. Because they had a "YOLO, just let the solicitor know you changed your name, or not, who cares" system.

[username332211]

I'm not sure this has as much to do with paper documentation as with the fact the UK has no unique identifier for it's citizens. In that situation, name changes should be a pain.

Just as much as it's a pain to deal with any other database without primary keys.

[ljf]

Indeed - people sometimes think that the National Insurance number is our identifier - but the forget you can use many names with that, and people get by just fine.

My mother is an actress and holds bank accounts (and gets paid) in her full name, her acting name and in her maiden name - I don't think the NI knows about these names any more than they know that she's paying tax to that NI number. Employers don't care as long as you provide an NI - there is not check to make sure it is the 'right name'.

They write to her at her 'full name' but she's able to live (entirely legally) as her other names too.

[surfingdino]

Digitisation is also problematic from the pint of view of tampering with data. It was more difficult to falsify or destroy evidence when it was mostly physical, it is trivial to do it when you are dealing with 1s and 0s.

[Muromec]

This is not how government databases work. Government is optimized to produce as much papertrail as possible in a lot of different places, including actual paper in a huge journal, listing the entries in the order of their acceptance.

Database is just the cache of current state of things for convenience, but all the events that contributed into reaching this final state are also recorded somewhere multiple times and those pieces of trail capture a lot of duplicate information regarding the previous state of system.

Government itself (as big G) doesn't tamper with data really. There is no point to tamper with data if you can control the rules to reach the final state and can legitimately feed events into it. Individual employees do tamper with data all the time and eventually get caught if somebody else cares enough to point it out and dig enough papertrail to make a point.

[mattmaroon]

The US functionally has it. Your driver’s license goes into a national database, as do your license plates and social security number. I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home.

Our licenses now need a federal registration for us to board a plane. I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t.

The NSA probably has everyone’s cell number, text messages, and metadata (including location) stored.

With tech being what it is these days anonymity doesn’t exist.

[notepad0x90]

Think of the basic needs of a human being. Buying food and water, paying for shelter and living in a safe environment. For these things, proving one's identity should not be required, nor should a person be required to do business with a 3rd party (banks and credit cards) or have their activity tracked and surveilled. A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

Other things like transportation, certain types of employment and participation in government, I can see why a national id would be required for those.

Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?

[kelnos]

> A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

Natural/inalienable rights are a fiction. No one has any rights unless someone with guns is willing to enforce those rights. And hopefully the people with guns have some checks and balances on them such that they can't use their guns to violate those rights themselves.

I think it's great that we have (some) governments that have some list of human rights enumerated in their laws and founding documents. But even then, rights are protected unevenly.

> Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?

That depends on what you mean by "authority". If you're talking about moral authority, then I'd probably agree with you that no, they don't. But in the end the authority that matters in reality is the kind you get by wielding a gun; under that definition, governments have all the authority they need to do stuff like that.

[soco]

You are presenting the government as being some external entity, not one chosen by will of the people. We have it like this because apparently most of the people got fed up with wielding their own guns all day long, and preferred to delegate that.

[falcor84]

I don't understand the argument you're making. How does whether you wield a gun correspond to whether you choose your government? Unless you choose your representatives by pointing your gun at people and telling them "be my member of congress, or else".

In any case, I absolutely agree with the parent that rights don't just exist as some platonic ideal, but rather need to be enforced in an organized manner, and I haven't seen any case yet of that being achieved without a representative government.

[vel0city]

> No one has any rights unless someone with guns is willing to enforce those rights

Right? Be in the state of nature. Argue with that lion you have a right to not be eaten. I don't think she will listen.

[notepad0x90]

you're right about force being the ultimate authority, if a government derives it's powers from it's force alone you would be right. but even in dictatorial regimes, the dictator needs support from various underlings and factions. But in the context of western democracy, governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. In that context, no such authority has been given to them.

But still, what I was alluding to was that while governments can alienate rights by force, them doing so is exceeding their authority and resisting their rule is not rebellion in that context. Even if the people voted to alienate such basic rights, the government still does not have legitimate authority. My goal was to take away legitimacy from such governments and their rule.

I stated this in a sibling comment as well but this is the reason by which american revolution (July 4th coming up!) was justified. The english rule under king george used force to restrict and regulate inalienable rights and thus lost it's legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it was possible to organize resistance and revolt against such rule.

[hajile]

The pro private gun ownership argument.

[wruza]

A practical and realistic point of view that you rarely meet today, thanks for writing my comment.

[SiempreViernes]

Funny how you describe the basic need as "the right to buy", what about those without enough resources to buy on their own such?

[mattmaroon]

Then you get into positive vs negative rights. We’re very much a negative rights society and you can’t square the two. Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. Your positive right is someone else’s lack of a negative right, the opposite isn’t true.

For someone to have a positive right to shelter, for instance, you have to take shelter from someone (or, as we typically do, money from someone to pay for it). Taxation is the one way we’ve managed to get people to at least someone accept positive rights here, but if you ask anyone under 30 who is a Republican why they are, they’ll almost always cite positive rights like welfare. It’s so uncomfortable feeling to us that it becomes the basis of our political philosophy frequently.

It’s never felt comfortable to me to call things like that a right. Public health care is the only sane option, IMO, and we should do it, but calling it a “right“ always feels wrong to me and I think most Americans agree because we’re so strongly in the negative rights camp.

[StockHuman]

> Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does.

The lack of positive rights infringes on a society’s own fabric, however. The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct. Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Society ensuring some minimum standard of health so that one may properly navigate life (and enjoy the rest of their rights) is framed as a right as health is a general precursor to everything else: it’s not that odd a framing, no? “You have the right to vote, but not to live long enough to get to the polls” is the outcome of categorizing essential societal functions as somehow out of scope of what society should do. I think the average Republican gets that, though a lower tax bill is always the priority.

[hajile]

In the US, the police have NO legal obligation to help or protect you.

"Rights to healthcare" ultimately means "rights to enslave healthcare workers". If healthcare workers refuse to serve you, you have no healthcare unless you force them to serve you which makes them your slave.

Positive rights always end up in some form of forced labor aka slavery.

The lawyer question is different. The government is given the right to enforce laws, but the responsibility to provide legal council to counterweight the force of government. Lawyers aren't compelled to be public defenders, but if no public defender were available/willing, the government would not be allowed to imprison and try someone, so it is a negative right.

[robertlagrant]

> The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct.

This is a negative right: the state cannot prosecute you without a lawyer on your side.

> Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.

Police protection is not a right. The police will come and investigate and follow up, maybe, but you can't assume they'll protect you. They might be far away and unable to do so.

[mattmaroon]

You have the right to live as long as you want to, you just don’t have the right to make me pay for it. Those are two very different things, both ethically and practically. (I am, as I said, pro public health care anyway.)

You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.

[mattmaroon]

Well, technically you can do those things without ID. People do. There are people who survive without it. We have millions of undocumented immigrants who simply can’t have IDs but they get by. I really don’t know how. They’re breaking laws doing it and we lack the political will to do anything about it. (And also our economy would crumble if we somehow stopped it entirely, we are highly dependent on them.)

But man, good luck. It’s really hard to economically participate in modern society without it. Most of our country is really hard to get around in without a car. Your job opportunities are really limited without a social security number. Etc.

Whether right or wrong, we functionally have national ID and my point really was that lack of something specifically called that isn’t going to save us from the barbarians at the gate.

[ReptileMan]

>A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate.

No it is not. All rights are created by the state and enforced by it.

[notepad0x90]

Rights are one thing, their protection is another. Most rights are granted by the state, some rights though are beyond the state's authority to grant. This belief and concept is the literal founding cornerstone of america as a nation.

The rebellion against english rule was justified because the state exceeded it's authority to regulate rights by restricting inalienable rights.

[mattmaroon]

A lot of them have proven this. Including the one this article is about. Everything is alienable.

[rootusrootus]

> I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t.

Some have. Oregon, as a single example, will let you opt for a non-Real ID card.

[Spooky23]

RealID requires a social security card and is mostly about making it difficult for poor people to vote.

Data exchange between DMVs or for other non-law enforcement purposes is coordinated through AAMVA. You can see what states exchange data here: (https://www.aamva.org/it-systems-participation-map). There are loopholes that people exploit - for example NJ registered trucks won't be subject to registration action in NY... so you can accumulate lots of tickets in NYC with no consequence.

Some Canadian provinces exchange data between individual states as well.

A system called Nlets connects every jurisdiction for law enforcement purposes.

[davchana]

In California, you need social security (number only, not card), only if you are eligible for one, or has one. If you are on a non immigrant non work visa, and thus are not eligible to work/ssn, you still can get REAL ID.

Not every REAL ID holder is a citizen & thus eligible to vote. Real ID needs only proof of legal status (citizen, permanent resident, tourist, work permit, study vis etc) and address.

[Spooky23]

Thank you for clarifying a corner case.

A US citizen requires proof of SSN, either a social security card or W2. This is a heavy burden for many people.

[kelnos]

> A US citizen requires proof of SSN, either a social security card or W2

That is incorrect. For example, see California's REAL ID checklist[0]. I got my REAL ID in CA by presenting my birth certificate and two forms of address verification.

It's possible that some states require proof of SSN, but that does not appear to be an absolute requirement for the feds to sign off on the state's process.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...

[davchana]

You are welcome.

This is not a corner case (SSN required, not card). I would say its more like 90%. Since 2021 nobody needs proof of SSN, they just need the SSN number itself.

To quote CA DMV website:

> Applying for a REAL ID requires proof of identity, proof of California residency, and a trip to DMV. You will be asked to provide your Social Security number on your REAL ID application (exceptions may apply).

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification....

[rootusrootus]

I just got a RealID myself a couple weeks ago. I did not have to prove anything about my SSN. I gave them a copy of my birth certificate, my old driver's license, and a piece of mail delivered to me at my home address. That's all.

The only thing on that list that takes any effort to get is the birth certificate. And everyone really ought to keep a copy of their own anyway. Even before RealID we used birth certificates for ID at the DMV, so it is not a new requirement (for Oregon at least).

[vetinari]

Why it is a heavy burden for a citizen?

(I'm not an US citizen, but even I have SSN).

[thatcat]

RealID is about biometeric collection. The requirement date keeps moving because if it is not required, but seems like it will be soon, then more people will consent voluntarily.

[jonathankoren]

> RealID requires a social security card and is mostly about making it difficult for poor people to vote.

Bruh. If you don't have a social security number, you can't even work legally. Also, 99% of people born in the US[0] get them at birth.

What are you talking about?

[0] I on the other hand, didn't get one until I was about 8 years old, because my parents wanted to hide me from the draft, but that's now the draft works, and you need a social security number for all sorts of stuff now, like tax deductions.

[Spooky23]

There’s a difference between having a social security number and a social security card.

You need a number to work. You need the card for real id. Replacement of a lost card is onerous. For a minor, incredibly onerous - you need a healthcare provider to sign a statement identifying the minor. (Good luck with that)

[elcritch]

I got a real id compliant drivers license last year and didn’t need my SS card.

[jonathankoren]

You're just making things up. Nothing you've said is true.

[aidenn0]

> Replacement of a lost card is onerous. For a minor, incredibly onerous - you need a healthcare provider to sign a statement identifying the minor. (Good luck with that)

Huh?

All you need for a child of yours under 12 is:

1. Birth certificate for child

2. Proof that you are a parent (usually #1 plus a government issued ID covers this; an adoption order may be needed if you aren't on the birth certificate)

3. Proof that the child was alive recently. Either medical or school records will cover this; it needs to have parent and child's name on it.

If the child over 12, you need the above, plus the child must present themselves at an office, preferrably with a photo ID (it need not be government issued; e.g. a school ID is fine). If your child doesn't have a photo ID, the individual officer may be a bit persnickety in this case, so having both medical and school records are good, though may not be required.

As an aside, if the child has a passport (possibly even a recently expired one) you're basically good to go, since it establishes both identity and citizenship.

[jackson1442]

Washington doesn’t even officially offer a RealID. Instead they have the “Enhanced ID” which functions as a passport card but does not have the security features required on a RealID (though it does have some additional features like RFID).

[_caw]

Can you expand on that? The Federal Government[0] seems to think the EDL[1] is a RealID.

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/real-id

[1] https://dol.wa.gov/id-cards/real-id

[joecool1029]

All EDL's are RealID complaint, not all drivers licenses are. NJ issues 'not for Real ID purposes' drivers licenses still with the option to get the realid yellow star licenses DHS shows on your first link. They keep pushing back the enforcement date due to various ACLU and state lawsuits as well as COVID-19 backlog.

[bobthepanda]

sure, but saying that EDLs are Real ID compliant directly contradicts the grandparent comment saying that WA does not issue a Real ID.

[Spooky23]

Not true. Proof of citizenship for Enhanced ID meets and exceeds the RealID requirement.

[Spooky23]

We have it explicitly as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport_card

[joecool1029]

I wouldn't FUD the passport card, it's a good alternative for age proofing that doesn't include home address information. Unless you like businesses collecting that information....

[Spooky23]

It’s not FUD! Personally, I don’t think it’s a negative thing at all.

[soco]

From what the comments added to this, I would say the best (only?) privacy-favoring aspect in the States is that personal identification is in chaos. Not that you wouldn't have some identification features, but every little corner handles them differently. Nevertheless, the security organs seem to have found effective ways around this chaos, so I'd say that with or without national ID those who need to know know, and the only ones left in chaos are the regular people.

[seethishat]

How much storage would you need to store every text message ever sent by everyone on earth indefinitely? Has anyone done the math on that? I'm not sure it's possible without some infinite storage system (that obviously does not exist).

[lotsofpulp]

> I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home.

I’ve driven a car with USA license plates through tolls in Canada and gotten a bill at home.

Also, passports have existed forever.

[InCityDreams]

Good history here (and, you're not incorrect) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport : modern passports 1920s.

"While the United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, no passport guidelines resulted from it. Passport standardization came about in 1980, under the auspices of the ICAO.

ICAO standards include those for machine-readable passports.

Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.

This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process these passports more quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer."

[skissane]

A lot has changed about passports even in my lifetime (I’m in my early 40s). I remember my mother showing me one of her old British passports, which had my younger brother on it.

The UK abolished family passports in 1998, so since then it has been impossible for a person to add their spouse or minor child to their British passport, your spouse/child needs a British passport of their own-even a newborn baby

Whereas, our other nationality, Australian (I, my mother and my siblings are all dual Australia/UK citizens), I’m not sure if it ever had family passports, but if it did, it must have abolished them significantly before the UK did

[blendergeek]

> I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t.

A lot of states still issue the non-federal ones. They are much cheaper and easier to obtain (at least where I live).

[skissane]

> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded

Australia tried to introduce a national ID card in the 1980s but the concerns over privacy made the idea so politically unpalatable that the government had to kill it

But in practice, for most Australian adults, your drivers license de facto functions as a national ID card. And with modern computer databases, data matching, identity verification APIs (which governments make available to trusted private businesses such as financial institutions) - the privacy benefits of dividing your identity across multiple purpose-specific ID cards vs a single generic one are arguably more theoretical than real.

Plus, Australia is far from being a poster child for privacy, especially as far as privacy intrusions by the government go. (It arguably does somewhat better for those done by the private sector - the AU government’s messaging to corporations who wish to invade its citizen’s privacy is very much we can, you can’t)

[gerdesj]

Feel free to substitute UK for Australia for your entire comment! I remember my mum getting a shitty on about ID cards in the UK back the '80s. We were living in West Germany at the time and the locals had them. The debate in the UK was ... desultory.

I can't speak for other members of the Commonwealth but I'm sure there will be similar stories.

As you say we all have a de-facto ID cards via driving licenses and/or passports. On the bright side, I don't fear for my life describing this state of affairs ... yet 8)

[solatic]

It's similar in many ways to "leaderless" organizations: getting rid of people with formal management titles doesn't mean you don't have managers, it means that it's not clear who the leaders are and that it's impossible for the organization to guarantee an orderly transfer of leadership when the shadow leaders eventually leave.

"Identity-less" societies are the same. You don't actually guarantee privacy, you just shunt the need to prove identity onto systems that are less suitable for the task (like driver's licenses and Social Security numbers), with less transparency and portability as a result. So where, exactly, is the utility in the collective lie?

[mrguyorama]

Also, this is very very important for people in the US to realize: Not having a "Social credit score" bureau doesn't mean the US doesn't have a social credit score! It only means the US government has to pay market rate for the service!

This is true for a lot of things the US allegedly "doesn't have", including domestic surveillance.

To ACTUALLY not have a social credit score system in the US, you MUST make even attempting to collect the necessary data so legally radioactive that most businesses are afraid to ask for birth dates, and keep voting out any politician that doesn't push for aggressive enforcement

[jauntywundrkind]

Show me a government that's lasted through hundreds of years of responsible careful balanced governance.

It's just so stupid to trust governments. They won't be the same government in a couple years, in most places in the world. (Gods fear those who do remain static & fixed!) The temptation to legislate, to start saving the children or hunting terrorists by becoming a police state is a temptation that should never ever be technologically open.

[rdlw]

The fact that a system may become perverted in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. Best of luck to my children's children, I hope they don't fuck it up too bad, but I'm not going to preemptively save them by not giving anyone power to govern in the present day.

[Aerroon]

>in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using.

A decade before my grandfather was born the area of my country was part of the Russian empire.

He was born into a democratic republic that turned into an autocracy while he was a child.

When he became a teenager the country was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the nazis, then the Soviet Union again. That last one lasted for 50 years during which he was sent to a gulag camp.

Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the country became a democratic republic again.

And now war seems to be on the horizon and the country might end up as part of a new Russian empire again. Probably won't, but the possibility exists.

Modern democracies are young. The US is the odd one by being so old without changing the form of its government.

Edit: the country also joined the EU, which took some sovereignty away, but I think this is a minor thing.

[gabaix]

As citizen in France, we also had an old democracy. Under Nazi Germany occupation it took no time for the ruling party to oppress ennemies of the state. Jews were hunted down using the National n database of names and addresses.

I do view technology as a double edged sword for the freedom of the people.

[bigstrat2003]

> The fact that a system may become perverted in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using.

I strongly disagree, given that you're also talking about a system which will be difficult to reform at best. At worst, it will require bloodshed (God forbid, but it does happen often enough throughout history). A system that will be that difficult to fix is one that you absolutely cannot afford to trust with more than the bare minimum of power.

[solatic]

It's a tool. Technology is neither positive, nor negative, nor neutral, it simply is. You might as well claim that banning guns will solve social violence and nobody will murder anybody anymore. The key is not to try to ban the tools (a deceptively alluring easy fix) but to fix the social ills (much harder).

[archsurface]

Not just the purpose of identity verification - identity verification at any time, anywhere, whatever you're doing.

[nkrisc]

> tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around.

Even in the US it’s not. I don’t know of a state where you can’t get a state identification card that has nothing to do with being licensed to operate a motor vehicle.

[wkat4242]

> a state identification card that has nothing to do with being licensed to operate a motor vehicle

Of course in a car-centric society as the US you could argue how optional that is :)

[nkrisc]

Depends where you live. I had a state ID for a little while when I was a young adult because I didn’t get my driver’s license right away. I used public transit and didn’t have a car anyway.

[mytailorisrich]

> Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.

> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded

Two interesting things here: They are uncontroversial because people are so used to them and, yes, the UK is much more privacy minded than, e.g., France in that regards.

In France everyone is used to carry their ID card with them (ID cards include the person's address and finger print is taken when ID card is used to anyone older than 13). Police have the right to ask for proof of ID without cause, and failure give them the right to detain the person until ID can be assertained (which means being driven to the police station). The history od ID cards in France is indeed one of state surveillance and control, and, tellingly ID cards became mandatory under the Vichy government in 1940 and although they have no longer been so in law since 1955, they de facto still are in daily life.

In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID and the police have no right to stop and ask someone to identify themselves (or any other questions) without cause. There is a big resistance against creating ID cards.

I read other comments that in the UK driving licences are de facto ID cards but I think this misses the point above. Of course they are situations in daily life when one needs to prove their ID (banks, etc). But the point is protection against the state/authorities and against being forced to identify yourself for no imperative reason.

[Barrin92]

>In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID

That's because the surveillance creeps in sideways. I believe it was Lee Kuan Yew who once stated that a 'vertical' strong government where duties between citizens and the state are explicit and clearly defined is much more rights preserving than a weak, 'horizontal' government, where you don't have to show your id but then the police goes and buys all your private information from the gray market private sector a la ClearView AI and sends it two the fifteen three letter agencies. It's no accident that the US, UK, AUS etc. are some of the leaders in this gray zone, intelligence, mission creep.

[renaudg]

I'm French and live in the UK, so feel qualified to compare. A few examples off the top of my head :

The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.

Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.

Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.

I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.

[mytailorisrich]

As it happens I am also French and living in the UK.

The ban on ethnic/racial data in France is a byproduct of the idealistic French republican view that the only thing that matters is whether people are citizens or foreigners and that citizens are all identical. This is not about "privacy".

But, pragmatically for a census, the British questions make much more sense and give a better snapshot of the country. In fact, in general the UK is more pragmatic than France and that has worked for the better historically.

In the UK the electoral register is a public record for good reasons (who can vote should be transparent), and as such it is available to anyone.

Credit agencies are a pragmatic (again) and private (emphasised) tool to protect against credit risk (I believe the GDPR express this as "legitimate interest"). The UK is much more trade and business oriented than France. Again that has worked rather well for them historically.

None of that counters my point about protection from the state.

In fact this is historically a very key difference between the UK and France: the power of the state/king was limited early in England (Magna Carta and all that) while France has had an absolutist streak (Louis XIV, French Revolution, Voltaire in exile in England, even Napoleon). To this day the role and power of the state is much stronger in France than in the UK.

I find this is a contradiction of French culture: on the one hand this disobedient and 'revolutionary' streak but, on the other hand a very strong state with people tending to call on the state for help about everything and anything. Or maybe these are the two sides of the same coin.

[GeoAtreides]

>n the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID and the police have no right to stop and ask someone to identify themselves (or any other questions) without cause.

Anyone who has watch police auditors in the uk knows how true that "no right to stop" actually is. They'll invoke Section 43 in 5 minutes top and detain you. They'll find something suspicious and detain you; they'll lie and forget to mention you don't have to id yourself.

Only people that haven't interacted with the police think that because there are no explicit laws requiring ID then the police can't actually ID them. Especially in the authoritarian UK.

[zabzonk]

practically impossible to do anything financially in the UK today without photo id (passport, driving license). this is supposed to prevent money laundering, but i suspect general control freakery.

[aaa_aaa]

A society can work without a centralized id system. Carry your id, save copies in a vault for verification if you want. Current id systems are just tools for surveillance and control, sugar coated with state welfare.

[viraptor]

What do you mean without a centralised id system? Whose id are you going to carry then? How many entities will you end up with issuing them? How many types will an arbitrary place that needs to check your id accept?

[Spivak]

This is such an odd comment given that this is literally how the US has always and still does work, and also how passports will continue to work.

You can present your out-of-state id, birth certificate, license plates and have them accepted anywhere. Universal != centralized, we build systems like this every day -- DNS, TLS, GPG, hell UUIDs.

[viraptor]

They're not really decentralised - more delegated, right? Can any state decide to not allow another state's driving licence? What about birth certificate? They're documents valid/expected at federal level.

[mrtksn]

Ah yes, in UK/USA they like to think that they have their privacy protected and fighting the overreaching government by not having a national ID cards and then go ahead and build giant surveillance agencies that spy on them all the time.

It's very weird IMHO. It just creates a lot of headache for the illusion of it, yet I like the attitude. The attitude is important because it defines the expectations from the government.

Another country where I have living experience is Turkey and Turkey has kick-ass ID system and consolidated online government services. Although its very convenient, it makes you feel like living in a boarding school. You can't do anything without providing your national ID number. Kid you not, they are implementing centralised package tracking system, the companies doing deliveries are required to report every package so the government knows who send stuff to whom at any given time. It's crazy, you feel watched all the time but its alright because the society is already collectivistic and the Turkish attitude expect that kind of control.

Bulgaria on the other hand, another country where I have living experience, does have ID system and used to employ national identity number since the communists days feels as free or even more free than UK. In Bulgaria, the government actually doesn't know where you are or what are you up to. When you have some governmental stuff to do you show up with your national ID card.

[dfawcus]

In the UK, it has little to do with privacy per-se, but that we know they will be abused. That being part of the national character which rears is ugly little head from time to time.

We kept ID cards after the end of WW2 for a period, until some time in the 50s. They were finally scrapped when a car driver rejected a police demand to see his ID card, and the court case backed him. Parliament got rid of them some time later.

Ever since successive governments (of all flavours) have wanted to bring them back, it seems there is an institutional desire for them amongst the mandarins of the civil service.

Finally the prior Labour government brought them back in 2006, but the subsequent 2010 coalition government scrapped them. Every party bar Labour had promised to scrap them in their manifestos.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006

So I'd not be surprised if our current GE led to another Labour government, and they brought the ID cards back.

At the time, and currently for some (i.e. me) a driving licence was a different document, without a photo. One which one is not obliged to carry while driving.

[mrtksn]

> but that we know they will be abused

What kind of abuse do you expect?

[yencabulator]

> the companies doing deliveries are required to report every package so the government knows who send stuff to whom at any given time

I would be genuinely surprised if this was not true of every current day "western" society.

United Stated Postal Service takes, stores, OCRs & shares with law enforcement photos of the cover of every letter you receive.

[em-bee]

in germany, austria and switzerland, the sharing of such information is illegal, and at best possible with a warrant. in the european union a general storing of all contact data is also not allowed. member states may only have laws that allow storing such data under very specific circumstances.

[yencabulator]

We are talking about the government being the party that wants the information, so in that environment needing a warrant is not a huge hindrance.

[em-bee]

that statement doesn't make much sense. only certain government institutions can ask for warrants and only judges can issue them. and warrants have to be specific for a cause. so getting this information is protected by all the necessary checks and balances.

[yencabulator]

Five Eyes/NSA/FISA have a history of counterexamples that make me think there's no reason to believe such laws prevent a government from surveilling whatever it wants.

If we know for a fact that phone call and internet metadata is routinely stored, I have no reason to expect mail or packages to be any different. (All the protections in that space tend to be for the contents not the metadata.)

[sjducb]

Occasionally a bad government will come along.

When the bad government tries to do the bad things it will use the tools it has to hand.

If there is a national ID card system that is required for daily life then it is much easier for the baddies to take control of the population.

You can see this in WW2 when the Nazis took control. The Netherlands was twice as effective at killing Jews than France. This is because the Netherlands had good record keeping and already knew who the Jewish people were.

Hundreds of thousands of French Jews survived because France did not have a pre-existing population tracking system. The Nazis had to build one from scratch and that took time, giving French Jews time to run and hide.

This is why a friend of mine refused to tell our local supermarket that she wants kosher food.

[admissionsguy]

When I was growing up in Poland, I found it ironic that the national ID card system in Poland had been introduced by the Nazi occupants and then preserved out of convenience.

When I lived in the UK, I found the lack of ID cards liberating, especially associated with the lack of mandatory reporting to the central government of your every address.

I now live in Sweden and the degree of centralisation and digitisation is scary. The current and foreseeable governments are wonderful by Western standards, but isn't it inevitable that darker times will come at some point?

[yencabulator]

The thing that gets ridiculous is Americans trying to argue that storing (state, state_local_driver_license_number) is somehow different than storing (federal_driver_license_number).

[junto]

Fun fact. Post-Nazi Germany recognized that centralized records storage was one of the main reasons a rogue state had been able to target Jews, “undesirables, and bohemians (woke) during the holocaust.

As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two. They get held in a kind of digital holding state during the transfer.

Post-Nazi Germany is one of the most privacy conscious nations I’ve ever seen. Germans still largely insist of the privacy on cold hard cash. Credit card uptake is still vastly lower than neighboring countries. Privacy laws are stringent and well defined. Usage of dashcams and ring cameras are challenging to keep legal.

I trust the German state more with an ID card system than I would the UK for example. British citizens have long given up their rights meekly to be spied on by their government and the UK government has a poor record of safely delivering well designed large IT projects.

[Muromec]

>As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two. They get held in a kind of digital holding state during the transfer.

Fun fact. When the war in the East started, first thing russians did in certain places was to go to the district tax office, get the to the decentralized paper storage and ransom every person who can reasonably have about 30K USD to not sit in the torture basement, including some random IT shmuks reading this forum.

Then the same people had a huge pain in the ass to prove their identity to other part of split-brained system, since all the primary documents are stored in a province that government can't physically access and trust their word.

[racional]

When the war in the East started, first thing Russians did in certain places was to go to the district tax office, get the to the decentralized paper storage and ransom every person who can reasonably have about 30K USD to not sit in the torture basement, including some random IT shmucks reading this forum.

Not surprising -- do you know of any sources to read up on about this?

[sjducb]

> As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two.

This doesn’t sound like much of a protection to me. The rouge central government could just seize the records from the states, then do bad things.

Good thing that the AFD only gets about 20% of the vote. (The AFD is considered too problematic by most European fascists. Many prominent members of the AFD want to deport a million people from Germany and are openly sympathetic to actual Nazis)

[MaxPock]

They didn't even allow Google steet view for the longest time

[LeonidasXIV]

That is not true. There was an outrage where a low-quality high-readership newspaper claimed that the streetview data would be live and show potential thieves when you are home or not. Thus Google created a system to opt out of their homes to be recorded, which has lead to so many people opting out that Google decided not to record any more street view data past the initial few cities in Germany.

[longerd2]

We had smart eIDs with proper PGP once :')

[olyjohn]

I'm every state that I am aware of, you can get and ID card that is not a drivers license. So it's not really got anything to do with driving.

[t0bia_s]

E-shops are good proof of working system without need of identify yourself by ID. Your could order anything by fake name on fake adress and waste time and money of delivery system, yet it is not happening.

Btw, ID's was mandatory first time by Hitler during WWII.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card